Streaming

You can also stream a file to a PUT or POST request. This method will also check the file extension against a mapping of file extensions to content-types, in this case application/json, and use the proper content-type in the PUT request if one is not already provided in the headers.

You can also pipe() from a http.ServerRequest instance and to a http.ServerResponse instance. The HTTP method and headers will be sent as well as the entity-body data. Which means that, if you don't really care about security, you can do:

http.createServer(function(req,resp){

if(req.url==='/doodle.png'){

var x =request('http://mysite.com/doodle.png')

req.pipe(x)

x.pipe(resp)

}

})

And since pipe() returns the destination stream in node 0.5.x you can do one line proxying :)

req.pipe(request('http://mysite.com/doodle.png')).pipe(resp)

Also, none of this new functionality conflicts with requests previous features, it just expands them.

var r =request.defaults({'proxy':'http://localproxy.com'})

http.createServer(function(req,resp){

if(req.url==='/doodle.png'){

r.get('http://google.com/doodle.png').pipe(resp)

}

})

You can still use intermediate proxies, the requests will still follow HTTP forwards, etc.

Forms

request supports application/x-www-form-urlencoded and multipart/form-data form uploads. For multipart/related refer to the multipart API.

Url encoded forms are simple

request.post('http://service.com/upload',{form:{key:'value'}})

// or

request.post('http://service.com/upload').form({key:'value'})

For multipart/form-data we use the form-data library by @felixge. You don't need to worry about piping the form object or setting the headers, request will handle that for you.

HTTP Authentication

If passed as an option, auth should be a hash containing values user || username, password || pass, and sendImmediately (optional). The method form takes parameters auth(username, password, sendImmediately).

sendImmediately defaults to true, which will cause a basic authentication header to be sent. If sendImmediately is false, then request will retry with a proper authentication header after receiving a 401 response from the server (which must contain a WWW-Authenticate header indicating the required authentication method).

Digest authentication is supported, but it only works with sendImmediately set to false (otherwise request will send basic authentication on the initial request, which will probably cause the request to fail).

OAuth Signing

// Twitter OAuth

var qs =require('querystring')

, oauth =

{ callback:'http://mysite.com/callback/'

, consumer_key:CONSUMER_KEY

, consumer_secret:CONSUMER_SECRET

}

, url ='https://api.twitter.com/oauth/request_token'

;

request.post({url:url, oauth:oauth},function(e,r,body){

// Assume by some stretch of magic you aquired the verifier

var access_token =qs.parse(body)

, oauth =

{ consumer_key:CONSUMER_KEY

, consumer_secret:CONSUMER_SECRET

, token:access_token.oauth_token

, verifier:VERIFIER

, token_secret:access_token.oauth_token_secret

}

, url ='https://api.twitter.com/oauth/access_token'

;

request.post({url:url, oauth:oauth},function(e,r,body){

var perm_token =qs.parse(body)

, oauth =

{ consumer_key:CONSUMER_KEY

, consumer_secret:CONSUMER_SECRET

, token:perm_token.oauth_token

, token_secret:perm_token.oauth_token_secret

}

, url ='https://api.twitter.com/1/users/show.json?'

, params =

{ screen_name:perm_token.screen_name

, user_id:perm_token.user_id

}

;

url +=qs.stringify(params)

request.get({url:url, oauth:oauth, json:true},function(e,r,user){

console.log(user)

})

})

})

request(options, callback)

The first argument can be either a url or an options object. The only required option is uri, all others are optional.

body - entity body for POST and PUT requests. Must be buffer or string.

form - when passed an object this will set body but to a querystring representation of value and adds Content-type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=utf-8 header. When passed no option a FormData instance is returned that will be piped to request.

maxRedirects - the maximum number of redirects to follow, defaults to 10.

encoding - Encoding to be used on setEncoding of response data. If set to null, the body is returned as a Buffer.

pool - A hash object containing the agents for these requests. If omitted this request will use the global pool which is set to node's default maxSockets.

pool.maxSockets - Integer containing the maximum amount of sockets in the pool.

timeout - Integer containing the number of milliseconds to wait for a request to respond before aborting the request

proxy - An HTTP proxy to be used. Support proxy Auth with Basic Auth the same way it's supported with the url parameter by embedding the auth info in the uri.

oauth - Options for OAuth HMAC-SHA1 signing, see documentation above.

strictSSL - Set to true to require that SSL certificates be valid. Note: to use your own certificate authority, you need to specify an agent that was created with that ca as an option.

jar - Set to false if you don't want cookies to be remembered for future use or define your custom cookie jar (see examples section)

aws - object containing aws signing information, should have the properties key and secret as well as bucket unless you're specifying your bucket as part of the path, or you are making a request that doesn't use a bucket (i.e. GET Services)

The callback argument gets 3 arguments. The first is an error when applicable (usually from the http.Client option not the http.ClientRequest object). The second in an http.ClientResponse object. The third is the response body String or Buffer.

Convenience methods

There are also shorthand methods for different HTTP METHODs and some other conveniences.

request.defaults(options)

This method returns a wrapper around the normal request API that defaults to whatever options you pass in to it.